Where’s my webcast?

I woke up this morning to pretty exciting news sent to me via emails of folks who had the strength to stay up for the ARRA meeting.   I went to the City of Alameda website to start watching the webcast feed and alas, it was not there.   So, you have to take John P.’s word for it on how the vote went down.  But I heard that the ARRA board first rejected the term sheet offered by Lentellus and then on to the motions.  The motion that eventually passed was offered by Lena Tam to select SunCal as Master Developer, with Doug deHaan seconding.   The vote went down with the ayes as: Tam, deHaan, and Marie Gilmore and the nays: Beverly Johnson and Frank Matarrese.   So SunCal it is.   Hmmm, do you think that the East Bay Express is going to write an article about this change in Master Developers?   It’s not as sexy as or as seemingly improper a story as the one they crafted with the initial selection, but I’m sure the intrepid reporters at EBX will find something to glom on to something to make it sound really shady. 

By the way, while I am talking about EBX, yay for several Alameda businesses/insitutions who got were selected as part of last week’s Best of the East Bay.  Off the top of my head I can remember that Ploughshares Nursery was mentioned, APC Bike Shop, Spiesekammer (for best cocktails), Buddhist Temple of Alameda, Alameda Freecycle, Mayor’s 4th of July Parade, Wilmot’s Books, and many more…

Until the webcast goes up, I’ll instead leave you with this post that I started writing on Monday morning, intended to then post on Tuesday, but then the Master Developer information was up in the air again yesterday, so here it is a little belated, the original title for this post was: “Alameda for me and me.”

Wow.

After days of nothing but pretty fluffy pieces, Alameda Daily News as posted a real doozy of a letter from your favorite perennial candidate and mine, Pat Bail.  She writes in to say (full post ahead, because you know, no archive and this needs to be preserved somewhere):

Editor:
The importance of Measure A in the quality of our lifestyle in Alameda can’t be under estimated. While it is important for any community to grow and improve, the manner in which that is accomplished is what makes a town worth living in. Most of us Alamedans don’t relish going off the Island, but sometimes we must. At those times we need to be able to do that in a reasonable manner. Public transportation is vital to an urban community, but let’s remember that only 30% of the residents will use public transportation. So, if we say that for every household there is an average of two cars and 2.44 people, you can see that things can get out of hand rather quickly.

Let’s just look at Bayport. 700 plus households. That means 1708 new residents. That also adds approximately 1400 cars. If only 30% use public transportation, that leaves 1196 people to use cars. Put another way, 70% of the approximate 1400 cars gives us 980 more cars on the streets.

Until our city leaders figure out a way to move people on and off the island in their cars, we need to proceed in a careful thoughtful manner. The proposition that we need high density to get more public transportation (remember only 30% will use it) is just wrong headed thinking. If we don’t overdevelop, we won’t need more public transportation that people won’t use.

All citizens need to attend the meeting on May 15th to explain to the City Council why they choose to live in Alameda . We want a safe, quiet, uncrowded community. We want a place were our children can grow up with security and safety, We want a place where we can walk our dogs after dark. We want a place where we know our police officers. We want a community where the city leaders pay as much attention to the current residents as they do to developers. We want our tax money to go toward supporting current infrastructure, not infrastructure that a developer wants the taxpayers to pay for, We need a balanced city budget. We need the redevelopment money to not go to projects that enrich developers, but to go to enrich our schools.

Show your support for a safe, happy community. Put a Keep Measure A sign in your front yard.
Pat Bail

My first reaction is that she writes to “Editor” and not “Don” like she normally does, which tells me that this letter was not just for us Alameda Daily News readers, “methinks” that this has been sent to numerous other news outlets, even the ones that she doesn’t think “report[s] the news.”  

Then she goes on to talk about the great touchpoint in this city (and probably other cities as well) traffic.  If we can’t strongarm people into submission over Measure A, let’s scare the bejeezus out of them over possible endless queues stacking cars trying to get off the island all the way to Otis.  She uses Bayport as an example of the excessive houseshold (”700 plus households.”, its own sentence to provide more significant impact as well) that will/have contributed to the traffic jams that will/have plagued Alameda.  It would be nice though, if maybe she had used the correct numbers in order to prove her point.  Bayport, even with the Breakers at Bayport is less than 600 households, not 700 plus.  And then there is the random assumption that each household has two cars and that each person takes their car individually everywhere.  

And there is this statement:

Until our city leaders figure out a way to move people on and off the island in their cars, we need to proceed in a careful thoughtful manner.

As Alameda is an island, any entrance and exit point to the Island is going to affect some other city, whether it is Oakland or San Leandro, the issue is not one that is isolated to only Alameda’s leaders, it becomes one that impacts other cities as well; thereby making it a regional issue.   I find it puzzling that while people talk about how Alameda is an island and therefore we should limit the housing built here so that current residents can get on and off the island more easily is pointed to as a reason to preserve Measure A, why a similar reasoning is not applied as a rebuttal.   If you voluntarily moved to Alameda, an island, with limited access and exit points to the “mainland,” isn’t there some expectation that it should be slightly more difficult to get to the freeway because of the nature of living on an island?  We can’t expect to have the same travel time as someone living in say, oh, Walnut Creek, being able to access the freeway entrances from multiple locations.   Just like everything is a choice, you choose to use your car and your neighbor chooses to use her car and the guy down the street chooses to use his car…adding and contributing to whatever traffic congestion there might be.  If you make the choice to add to the traffic, then you have to learn to deal with the traffic.

Pat B. also says:

If we don’t overdevelop, we won’t need more public transportation that people won’t use.

Simply using her figure of 30% of people using public transportation indicates that there are people who use public transportation.  If she is making the implication that 30% of the population is not significant portion of the population, then let me offer this as a comparsion.   Let’s say there were roughly 24,000 people who voted in the last election and approximately 73,000 people living in Alameda, well then, that is roughly 33% of the population who cast votes in the election.   Seems pretty significant to me.

You have to hand it to Pat B. though, rather than pose it as people coming out to the May 15th meeting to say, “We don’t want you to talk about Measure A” she instead couches it as:

…explain[ing] to the City Council why they choose to live in Alameda .

Until Pat B. or Denise Brady or Diane Coler-Dark or any number of Measure A proponents offer up hard and fast “facts” that show that Measure A has made a:

1. [S]afe, quiet, uncrowded community
2. [P]lace were our children can grow up with security and safety
3. [P]lace where we can walk our dogs after dark
4. [P]lace where we know our police officers

What they are offering is shallow political sloganeering and “spurious scare tactics” in order to boost support for their cause.   It’s a worthy request to have residents march one by one before the City Council to talk about why they love Alameda or why they chose to live in Alameda.  But the issue that she is asking people to speak about is not why Alameda is the greatest place in the world, but rather it is about whether or not we as Alameda-loving citizens have the right to participate in forums to talk about something that has been called:

…the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in Alameda.

If it is indeed the most important piece of legislation passed in Alameda, then it should be reviewed and revisited.  And talked about for as long and as much as people want to talk about it.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if Measure A is indeed everything that its proponents say that it is, then there shouldn’t be a concern about discussing it.

And just one more thing regarding this statement:

We need the redevelopment money to not go to projects that enrich developers, but to go to enrich our schools.

Lest people go around saying how redevelopment money is being siphoned away from our schools and is the cause of all the school district’s problems, Stop, Drop, and Roll has already covered and has promised to continue covering this in detail. 

Also, one does not need to

Show your support for a safe, happy community.

By placing a Measure A sign in one’s yard.   I support a safe and happy community, but I don’t know if Measure A will continue to make Alameda a “safe, happy community.”  However, if some proponents have their way, no one will ever know because we won’t be able to talk about it, for good or for bad.